Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

by Aspen Matis

  But this time his absence felt different. There was no question—I knew our separation wasn’t permanent. I had no doubt he would be waiting for me where the trail ended.

  And I’d thrive in these mountains. I had been cold before; I could handle myself in the wild. I was an animal learning, instinctively. So little time remained to make this dream real—it would all end soon—and I had just eighty-nine miles to walk from Stehekin to the border. Just three or four more days—my last. It felt fitting and right to walk these final miles alone. Dash had left me free to finish at my own pace, the way I’d started—and beat this storm.

  I left Stehekin on the second bus, at five thirty that evening, exhausted; I walked through dusk—determined to reach Canada before snow erased the world. The land became a vast bed of gravel, I was exposed. The trees vanished. I walked swiftly, happy, drinking the vastness of my freedom. Small stones sifted into my shoes’ mesh, muddy pebbles; the ground became soft with them. My calloused feet were unbothered, immune. My legs were strong.

  That evening, still hiking swiftly, I smelled sugary lilac; instantly I knew it was a day-hiker’s perfume. Then I saw the shadow: a lady hiking. High on a ridge we met; she stopped me to ask where I’d come from and where I was going, astonished to learn I’d walked the whole trail from Mexico.

  “And what made you decide to do this?” she asked. She was probably forty, and her lipstick matched mine. She said the distance I’d traveled was amazing.

  “My parents used to always take me backpacking,” I said, “and I still love it.”

  The woman nodded adamantly. “Yes, excellent.” She said, “You go girl!” She was looking at my face in the dark air—at my sunglasses. She was trying to see me. I wanted to take the glasses off, but then I wouldn’t be able to see her.

  I left them on and thanked her, and said goodbye. I kept going.

  She called after me to say I was her hero.

  My ears rang, I walked away unsteady—

  I had transformed my body, I was strong and resourceful—in the woods I had learned I was capable of anything I committed to doing—but I hadn’t committed. I could pitch a tent and carry a backpack a marathon a day through mountains—a thousand feats—physically I’d become undeniably confident—I had survived 2,600 miles from Mexico to this cold night in a spill of mossy black forests—but even as I walked alone over the crests of the Cascade Mountains, my inabilities still trapped me. I was her hero who couldn’t put in contact lenses, who was still embarrassed I wore sunglasses at night.

  I began to run, as I had on the very first day in the desert; I committed: I would beat the snow. I absolutely needed to complete this walk. I crossed mossy rock slabs: northern Washington’s granite spine.

  It must have been ten or later by the time I stopped, camping directly under the cool spray of stars’ pale etching on the navy sea of sky.

  That night in my journal I began a new list, like the ones I’d make and throw out as a kid, but this one to keep—I will:

  • touch my eyes.

  And I saw that there was something else I still needed to change.

  As my mother wished, I wasn’t telling people about my rape, or raising money for RAINN. When asked, I changed my reason for walking back to John Muir, childhood backpacking, my wonderful summer base camp out in Colorado Springs—vague and faded things. I had almost completely stopped speaking about my more recent past. I had stopped telling people the truth about my rape and I had found a crutch in the word “virgin.”

  I needed to stop it.

  “Virgin” surprised men, contradicted everything they had heard and thought they knew about me—it got men to back off quickly. It was my shorthand for innocence. It told people irrefutably my body was my own, not to persist— the rumors they’d heard were false—but it was a lie.

  It wasn’t who I was.

  In those dark hours, tentless and exposed to the night, my mind returned to The Breakfast Club ending. I saw the way I’d accepted Junior’s joint, giving the college a reason to blame me for what came next. The way I’d told him to leave now, very softly. Before the boy had raped me, I had wanted him to want to kiss me.

  More than anything, more than everything, I’d felt guilty.

  For this entire walk, my desire had ashamed me, as if my wanting to be kissed that night mitigated the fault of Junior’s sudden deafness. I’d been given stacks of reasons to blame myself for an act of violence committed by another. I had blamed my flirting for his subsequent felony. My college taught me: my rape was my shame. Everyone I’d trusted asked only what I might have done to let it happen.

  In my gut, I’d always believed I’d caused it.

  I finally questioned it.

  I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw. Junior was guilty of forcing me to have to actively fight for my own safety in the first place. The virgin lie was my answer to my painful shame; the lie created its own, new shame. I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the shame wasn’t mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.

  Silent snow was falling, faint in the dark woods; the ground beneath my thin foam sleeping pad was a rug of moss; I felt close to the ground, at home here. The ancient moss smelled sweet, and I felt buoyed.

  I crossed into a new territory in the woods. I pardoned myself for being passive and paralyzed in the face of danger—whether it was the danger of starvation or of being raped when I was eighteen and painfully innocent. I finally bypassed the wall I hadn’t known I was hitting: the wrong conviction that I was to blame for Junior’s decision to attack and threaten me.

  My rape was not my fault. Old words returned to me:

  No one causes rape but rapists.

  I believed it.

  And I forgave myself for my rape.

  I scrawled under galaxies, glancing at night’s sky through sunglasses, as I had for my whole walk. I wrote for hours as the clouds cleared and the spray of stars reappeared in the cold blackness, brighter now.

  I woke to snow. It was first light, the forest and my sleeping bag shimmering, dusted with powder, enough to make the world gleam, but nothing dangerous: blue dawn.

  The snow had stopped. Dark gray rolls of clouds drifted eastward, and I was whitened, glittering and cold. The climate of these mountains was damp, the weather erratic—fierce and fitful. Tomorrow it might snow again and pile higher. I walked, floated, lighter—forty miles, my biggest day yet. I’d lifted the burden of guilt and shame off of my body. I held my new hard-won wisdom, the gift three months of walking in the wilderness had carried me to: compassion for my younger self—forgiveness for my innocence.

  I was gliding. My heart beat fast, faster in the dark—still fast when I again collapsed on the dirt trail and rested. That night, my very last on the PCT, my thighs were numb. I had no energy to pitch my tent, and I again slept directly on the dirt, under stars.

  I swore to tell the story that those in charge of caring for me had silenced.

  Quiet forest lay before me, cold and white—and I would make it: Canada.

  In those final eighty-nine miles, I wouldn’t once pitch my shelter. Out of exhaustion, or maybe simply in deep comfort, I slept each night directly under evening sky.

  The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape—my word. The subsequent silencing and exile—misplaced shame—were the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother’s grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong—to my mother, and to the world. I’d believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able—so they could finally know that I was strong.

  Instead I had shown myself.

  And it felt wonderful.

  I wa
s ending a wild child transition phase, filthy, stoveless makeupless and mapless, but also the fittest I’d ever been—testing myself in a hundred extreme ways, failing until I decided that the consequences of failing myself were too devastating to justify—and the only option I had left was to change, to do the very things I was so sure I couldn’t, to survive.

  Living in woods, I had sweat and bruised, walked boldly through snow and shame and pain. I faced obstacles and monsters and had some very thirsty miles, dark nights, freezing mornings and dreamlike days of fear of starving in which I came close to dying; I’d made it past desert sunspots: my own blindness. I had earned the very self-reliance, poise and self-assurance that I believed would remain forever out of my reach as I’d stared at Lake Morena’s dirty mirror that morning five months earlier—a country away.

  I’d entered a place in my life where I was straddling two names—Debby Parker of my past, Wild Child of a life that was now ending—just as I was straddling my childhood girl and the woman I was becoming. I’d walked away from Debby, and in my darkest desperation, at the edge of my death, passed through Aspen Meadow to get to Muir Trail Ranch, to be saved, to save myself. To find my strength.

  When I came closest to death, the woods gave way to Aspen. The name brought my gifted future.

  I was not forever lost.

  The border is defined by a road-wide clear-cut line in the thick pine forest. I stood at the wooden monument that marked the end of my 2,650-mile hike from Mexico to Canada; I stared at the thing with glazed eyes. No tears, no ecstatic dance. I’d accomplished what, five months earlier, I had set out to accomplish.

  I took a picture of myself in front of the Pacific Crest Trail’s northern terminus and kept walking. Where the trail ends, there isn’t anything. I had to walk eight more miles to a highway in Manning Park, Canada, and then I’d have to find something more to do.

  I had feared this end, wondered where I would go from it, from the moment I first stepped on this footpath in the desert. But I found I was not afraid of reaching it now. I was happy. I hadn’t found every answer for where I was going, but I now had all I needed to take these next steps. I knew I would do what I needed to do to become a writer now.

  I was going to be Aspen, without the barriers Debby was trapped by. And I had found a partner who would help me reach where I wanted to go, identify and guide my path in ways I couldn’t yet. He told me to write, he told me to do what I loved and what he saw moved me closer to what I wanted most. I could walk forward with him now. He was helping me carve a strong new path that led from this post that marked the end of the path we’d met on, and I trusted it. I could take the gift Wild Child had found and with his hand, walk into Aspen Matis.

  I grinned as I stepped. This name felt like home. I trusted where it would lead.

  And to get there, I knew how to walk.

  At the highway, Songbird, Shell, the Stumbling Norwegian, Bonanza Jellybean, A-Bear, and a few new hikers I’d never met but who must have been always around—and Dash—were clapping.

  For me.

  Dash ran to me, hugged me. A-Bear handed me a beer and a brownie. Songbird’s family had a grill set up, and the smell hit me like wind—charred meat. On the side of the highway, they were making burgers for us hikers, as if we were just any hungry people. Really that was what we were now: hungry people.

  Then Dash kissed me. He was here; I was here. I smiled and pressed my cheek against his chest. “We did it,” I said to him.

  He lifted my hand in his. He said, “Now’s the scary part.”

  It seemed an arbitrary end. I stood in that forest spot and looked to Dash’s face. I heard a car’s tinny engine and could see through the trees an old Jeep passing.

  Standing in the clearing where the PCT joined with the highway, looking from tree to tree, smelling meat charring, burning wood snapping and smoking, I saw the other trails I might have taken, the other yellow dirt ways my life more easily might have gone. In one world, I’d never have known of the Pacific Crest Trail. In another, I’d have flown back home, weak with MRSA and healed there—and never returned to the PCT. Truly I nearly hadn’t. In most worlds, Dash would live, and I would live, and our footsteps wouldn’t ever have overlapped.

  We wouldn’t meet. In another, Junior Mason would have stopped when I said stop, and I’d study English at Colorado College, and I’d graduate, not unhappy, not so extremely happy, Debby Parker. I’d become an English teacher or a professor, walking the middle road.

  I kissed back the man who would become my husband.

  From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall—feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I’d survived rape—I’d have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.

  This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.

  I wrote it.

  In the dim of the Cinder-block Palace I had listed the things I would carry, the things I thought I’d need to survive in wilderness alone.

  In Canada I saw the list newly. I hadn’t truly survived all on my own. I could see I’d been supported the whole way through.

  I saw: The Things That Carried Me:

  • John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

  • John Donovan, for showing me that even in death, gifts lie in wait, revealed in storms and snow.

  • Trail Magic, for showing me that when you’re walking through deserts that should give no refuge, the road will provide, so long as you keep stepping. An unexpected peach could propel me 100 dusty miles.

  • Trail Angels unseen and unacknowledged, who provided essential and reliable support, showed me to trust that when I need help it will come. They proved a silent, sightless force aids people on all journeys that matter.

  • My father’s music—You’re a big girl now, And hard like an oak, Buckets of moonbeams in my hand. These mantras lulled my mind to solace in Maine’s virgin woods and the house my dad imagined for us there. Dad’s wilted brave dreams of beauty, abandoned homes of my childhood: constant rhythms of love that that would sterilize the terrible seeds that had stained me.

  • The running shoes my mom always remembered to send before my last pair was worn out.

  • My trail legs. When I rely on them they grow strong. They carried me through the woods when my mind couldn’t.

  • My parents, who taught me how to walk.

  • The Pacific Crest Trail. It led me someplace worth going, after all.

  EPILOGUE

  A Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with my terrible passivity and fear. I hadn’t trusted myself to be able to do anything for myself without guidance and assistance. Then I took a reckless leap: I tried to. I walked boldly into desolate mountains; I lay motionless through black star-etched nights alone. I had taken six million steps in the direction of my grand hopes for myself—and had delivered myself to Manning Park and amnesty from shame. I found my strength and independence. I had contracted MRSA and left this trail for just long enough to come back to meet Dash; I’d beat the winter, and crossed over, my childhood over.

  The day after I finished, snow fell like an endless curtain and few hikers behind us on the trail would make it through. It seemed everything had happened just in time, in grace.

  I would return to Eden, living in my old college town’s beauty, walking under the campus’s golden aspens with Dash through the fall. We slept on a mattress on the floor of his apartment, and then in our bed.

  On the last day of February we walked together through Colorado Springs’s beautiful red rock state park—the Garden of the Gods. Erect pinnacles of rock shot into the pristine blue sky, tiny people clinging to them, climbing. I could smell the
clay earth and Dash’s hair. I felt very close to him. There, walking that Eden, clasping each other’s hands, we became engaged.

  I would go back to school, this time not within the Eden of my childhood but in New York City. I would write every day, that was my job now, and I’d publish my stories in the New York Times, my favorite literary magazines—journals I’d long-read and daydreamed with but never thought I had permission to submit to.

  The next summer Dash and I would return to the Pacific Crest Trail and re-hike six hundred of California’s most remote and striking miles. And when we got to trail-side towns we’d eat fresh strawberries and fat cherries shipped from Leona Valley and shower in motels with flower-printed curtains and compile lists of friends and plan our wedding.

  We returned to the Cascade mountain, where we’d met, and wed.

  I didn’t know then if Dash and I would end up with three kids, together forever like my parents, or if the inevitable responsibilities—and normalcy—of our lives in the “real world” would extinguish the fire of this young love. If the heat would slowly cool. Maybe I’d be left in the woods in darkness. Perhaps unformed storms poured farther down our path, unseeable. All I knew was he was the sweetest, most gentle man I’d ever met, and I would let him lead me to New York, back to school.

  And if I’d be left alone in woods again, I smiled to think how I’d find new gifts and thrive. At the end of a long trail and the beginning of the rest of my life, I was committed to always loving my self. I would put myself in that win-win situation.

  I sat alone in my Greenwich Village apartment with a new determination. Dash had returned to the woods, to walk from Mexico to Canada, again; I’d returned to wearing thick glasses, still believing I couldn’t touch my eyes. It had been months since Dash disappeared down some new side-path into his dark woods, and I was done with being bound to glasses, with waiting for him to return to me.